DC notables mourn teen shooting victim

Mourners gather outside the Greater Harvest Baptist Church in Chicago on Saturday for the funeral of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old high school student who was killed last month in a shooting. (THE NEW YORK TIMES)

CHICAGO 
By the hundreds, mourners filed into the pews of a crowded church on this city’s South Side on Saturday, clutching each other, weeping and wearing buttons adorned with the smiling face Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old girl whose death had come to represent the miserable cost of gun and gang violence.

“She is a representative not just of the people in Chicago, she is a representative of people across this nation who have lost their lives,” said Damon Stewart, Pendleton’s godfather, said as he urged people not to politicize her death.

An array of Washington officials — the first lady, Michelle Obama; Arne Duncan, the education secretary; and Valerie Jarrett, a senior White House adviser — were among dignitaries sitting in the front row. Pendleton, a member of her high school’s majorette team, had traveled to Washington to perform during President Barack Obama’s inauguration festivities only a week before she was fatally shot here.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who has met with the girl’s family and spoken emotionally of her dreams for her future, attended, too, as did Gov. Patrick J. Quinn, who had alluded to Pendleton in his state-of-the-state address.

Pendleton’s death last month became a symbol for a different element of gun violence — urban and often quickly forgotten. Pendleton, a student at King College Prep high school, was shot Jan. 29 as she sat after school in a park about a mile from Barack Obama’s Chicago home with friends — a group that the police say was probably mistakenly swept into the cross-fire of a gang fight.

In Chicago, people said they viewed the sudden rush of attention on Pendleton as a needed shift in the consciousness of the nation’s third-largest city, which experienced more than 500 homicides in 2012, many of them from gun violence, and 46 more deaths since the start of 2013.

“It should be a tipping point,” Andre Smith, head of Chicago Against Violence, a local group aimed at preventing neighborhood violence, said Friday as he and scores of others attended a visitation for Pendleton, whom he had not known while she was alive. “I just hope that it’s not here today and gone tomorrow.”

In the days since Pendleton’s killing, a debate had ensued here over what the White House response should be. Some, including the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, local newspaper editorial boards and students, had urged the president to appear at the girl’s funeral.

Family members said they were pleased and honored that Michelle Obama, who has lived on the South Side of Chicago and met with the Pendleton family before the funeral service, chose to come.

“It says to us that not only is she coming in support of our family, but she’s a parent,” said Shatira Wilks, a cousin of Pendleton’s who has in recent days been serving as a spokeswoman for the family. “She has daughters. She understands. She’s not being intrusive. It’s not about her being seen.”